Tag: Columbus

The Grass is Still Growing

I have written about Columbus (Indiana) before. The little town cultivates a lot of modern architecture, given its size and location. This Fall it houses an exhibit of contemporary sculptures.

DSC 6825

Wiikiaami by studio:indigenous made me think of being caught in a gigantic fish trap (incidentally, the German word Reuse for it seems to have no english counterpart). At the moment, spiders have taken it as their new home.

DSC 6836

The Moore sculpture is now framed by Conversation Plinth from IKD.

DSC 6839

My favorite sculpture is Anything can happen in the woods by Plan B Architecture & Urbanism.

DSC 6886

They consist of metal columns seemingly growing next to grass covered mounds that were intended for sitting but are more used for climbing.

DSC 6984

Squaring the Circle

Squaring the circle is easy, you just need to know what you want to do. My personal favorite method is to use elliptic functions defined on rectangular tori to map rectangles to disks, as shown below for a square. These maps don’t preserve area (which is what the Greeks had wanted), but they preserve angles.

Circlesquare

I had some leftover architecture images from Columbus and wanted to see how they look when made circular. Here, for instance, is the AT&T building

DSC 5596

and this is a circular version:

Ex5

There are three degrees of freedom one can play with (the dimension of the automorphism group of the hyperbolic plane), which means that one can squeeze parts of the image towards the boundary cirle. Here are two other versions of the same image.

Att2

Another favorite of mine is the atrium of the Cummins office building with its wonderfully intricate play with straight lines and black and white.

DSC 5562

Now we only have to find architects and builders who create buildings that have these curves in reality.

Cummins

Columbus out of Focus

A while back I confessed that I had acquired a Velvet 56 from Lensbaby. Yesterday I decided to try this lens with street photography and architecture, abusing charming Columbus (Indiana) for that purpose. Of course, all images were taken wide open. Brace yourself.

DSC 5220

Above is the entrance of the Cummins Headquarter building. This lens has clearly difficulties here. The overall softness distracts from the graphical elements. If you don’t know what Cummins is making, you can see one of their products below. It is not a space ship, nor a gun.

DSC 5214

While Cummins would probably not use this image for marketing, the Velvet 56 does a much better job when there is an obvious foreground. With the rental bikes lined up below, one can see nicely how the lens progresses into unsharpness and how it deals with highlights.

DSC 5264

I still like that image, and even more so the image below. Beautiful couple on beautiful bikes.

DSC 5281

My favorite is the last one, however. The unreal mini-halos about all the highlights on the chairs complement the mural as if the lens just came out of the bar…

DSC 5269